Have nothing to do with the [evil] things that people do, things that belong to the darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light... [For] when all things are brought out into the light, then their true nature is clearly revealed...

Last Thursday Montana Governor Steve Bullock signed into law the strongest prohibition yet by any state against accepting “free” used military equipment from the federal government. A month ago New Jersey Chris Christie signed into law prohibiting such “free” used war materiel without express approval from the local governments involved. Montana’s new law outright prohibits any department in the state from receiving drones that are armored or weaponized (or both), military aircraft, grenades or grenade launchers, silencers and “militarized armored vehicles.”

In New Jersey the bill passed both houses unanimously; in Montana the House voted 79-20 in favor while the Senate voted 46-1 in favor. Under the new law police departments remain free to purchase such materiel, but

This writer has frequently noted the accuracy of John Adams’ summary and dangers of the Founders’ Constitution when he said that it “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” It was designed, as Thomas Jefferson noted, to keep criminals like Barack Obama from taking control:

The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first.

During the Constitutional convention there was little debate over the issue of immigration and so those chains were not forged with the result that the states, up until 1808, were to determine their own immigration policies, and afterwards to defer to the national government.

Consequently, when Obama asked his henchmen, Jeh Johnson and Eric Holder, to find ways he could implement the DREAM Act without having to wait for Congress to enact it, they succeeded, using the president’s discretion allowed by the Constitution under Article I, Section 4, that “he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

One of the tools of a tyrant is using language to hide his true intents. For years Obama has disclaimed any such powers as he is now exercising. As a candidate back in March, 2008, he said:

This article first appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, February 5, 2015:

Harry Reid

Five whistleblowers from the Department of Homeland Security related details to ABC News on Tuesday about how the “wealthy immigrant visa program” called EB-5 has been consistently and deliberately subverted to allow criminals, spies, and terrorists access to permanent residency in the United States without going through regular channels.

The EB-5 program, first begun in 1990 as a way to invite wealthy foreigners to invest in the United States and then receive permanent resident status, has been used for years by politicians to reward themselves and their friends. Those rewards included

This first appeared at The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Monday, February 2, 2015:

Taking a page not only out of the Super Bowl on Sunday, but also out of the statistical study proving that offense is more effective in winning than defense, Obama is offering a grievously offensive and logically indefensible budget for 2016 today (Monday, 2/2/15). His proposal is morally offensive in that he proposes to take money earned by some and give it to others. It is logically flawed in that it will increase deficits each year for the next ten years, adding yet another $6 trillion to the $18 trillion already extant (up from the $10 trillion when he took office in 2008). It will limit job growth, stifle innovation, keep tax lawyers and accountants busy into eternity, and do nothing for his favorite target: the beleaguered middle class.

None of that matters. It’s all for show and to keep the Republicans on the defensive by couching his proposal in terms that only progressives could love:

On the day after Super Bowl Sunday, President Obama, knowing that an offensive strategy most likely wins the game while a purely defensive strategy guarantees losing it, is challenging the new Republican-controlled Congress with his offensive 2016 budget proposal starting October 1. He is daring them to play defense without appearing to favor the ultra-rich, so-called trust-fund babies, and corporations parking billions in earnings abroad to avoid high rates of corporate taxation here.

Besides, in a preview of this strategy on Saturday during his radio address, the president said he thinks

Senators attending this week’s hearing entitled “Beyond Silk Road: Potential Risks, Threats and Promises of Virtual Currencies” being held by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee already knew what they were going to hear: the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was going to make the case that

This article was first published by The McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Wednesday, October 2nd, 2013:

The president anticipated glitches when his key legislative centerpiece was rolled out on Tuesday, and he got them:

In the first week, the first month, the first three months, I would suspect that there will be glitches.

This is 50 states, a lot of people signing up for something. And there are going to be problems. And I guarantee you, there will be problems….

Even fawning CNN had to admit there were problems: “We tried in about 20 different states’ [exchanges]. In 12 of them we hit glitches. Sometimes it made it impossible to sign up. There were error messages….”

And then Obama had the chutzpah to compare the Obamacare roll out with the recent Apple roll out of its new operating system:

Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system and within days they found a glitch, so they fixed it.

I don’t remember anybody suggesting [that] Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t.

There’s just one tiny problem with this analogy. I don’t remember any government agent holding a gun to my head forcing me to buy an iPhone.

But the Obamacare Kool-Aid has affected others, not just Obama. HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius called the glitches a great success:

We have had a few slowdowns, a few glitches, but it’s sort of a great problem to have. It’s based on the fact that the volume has been so high.

Unspoken is the assumption that Obamacare hits on exchange websites is so high because Obamacare is so popular. Isn’t that like saying that paying income taxes must be popular because so many people file income tax returns?

The problems were rife, all across the country. The moment New York’s new healthcare website was launched at 8AM, it crashed. Seekers “were greeted with error messages … [and] the links for employers, employees and brokers also experienced periodic problems,” according to CBS News. In California an insurance broker scheduled an appointment with two of his clients to be the first in the state to sign up for Obamacare, but had to cancel the appointment when he discovered that he wasn’t “approved” to sign them up, and he couldn’t tell his clients how much they would have to pay for the insurance anyway – the premium calculation bot wasn’t working. Besides, he learned later that his customers’ applications wouldn’t be received by the insurance companies for at least a month. Aside from that, things went well.

In Washington, DC, people trying to determine if they were eligible either for Medicaid or for subsidies to purchase insurance on its exchange will have to wait. In Vermont, that state’s exchange won’t be able to accept premium payments until sometime in the middle of November. In Oregon, only a few specially selected individuals were allowed to get online as its rollout was only a “beta test” – the real rollout would be taking place later.

The administration admitted that its own website was suffering a delay in its online shopping system for small business owners, along with a delay in its Spanish-speaking site. In Colorado, its exchange, Connect for Colorado, was forced to delay certain computer functions, and applicants had to call a hotline to complete the process. In Iowa there were no certified “navigators” to take those calls. Reuters noted that these glitches showed up in 24 of the state exchanges. Maryland’s exchange was delayed for four hours, and Minnesota said it would be late in the day when it would be able to confirm its connection to the federal data base.

So much for the triumphant start. As Joel Ario, a health care consultant who used to work at the Department of Health and Human Services, said: “Nobody is going to say we’re not starting on October 1st. But in some situations you have seen a redefinition of what ‘start’ means.”

Sarah Kliff, a writer for the Washington Post who has been tracking the Obamacare launch for months, said that yesterday wasn’t really “the big day” after all – it was just the beginning of a “soft launch”:

Instead, it’s January 1st, the day that the individual mandate takes effect and any plans purchased on the [exchanges] actually kick in.

The space between October and December is viewed … as a soft launch: the time to make the new web sites live, sort out the kinks and get the sites in prime condition for the beginning of 2014.

Enrollment started on Tuesday but any insurance purchased won’t become effective until January 1. And for those who delay, they have until March 15th to make their purchases or else be faced with paying a fine – oops, a tax, not a fee.

There are some other problems, too. According to the Kaiser Foundation, more than three quarters of those without insurance didn’t even know that the launch date was October 1st. And how about this for a marketing problem: the insurance companies will have to persuade healthy young people to buy insurance they don’t want in order to offset the costs of unhealthy people pouring into the system. Here’s how the Associated Press explained it:

One of the biggest challenges to the law’s success is the ability of insurers to persuade relatively young and healthy people to buy insurance as a way to balance the costs for the sicker people who are likely to get their coverage as quickly as possible.

Previous such rollouts have hardly been successful. When Massachusetts opened its version of Obamacare in late 2006, it took a total of 18 separate interactions – web visits, emails, or phone calls – before an individual could get coverage. After 9/11, the FBI tried – for 12 years – to upgrade its computer system. It began with its Virtual Case File system which was given up for lost in 2005 after $600 million of taxpayers’ money, in favor of its Sentinel system, which finally went live last year.

The task with Obamacare is equally daunting: hooking up the national databases at the Department of the Treasury (the IRS) and the Department of Homeland Security with each of the states’ exchanges. As James Pethokoukis, a writer for the American Enterprise Institute, asked: “What could possible go wrong?”

All of these glitches may be considered in another light: they build the case for a national single-payer health care system that would do away with insurance companies and those messy and confusing state exchanges. Harry Reid, bless his statist heart, was interviewed on Las Vegas’ PBS program “Nevada Week in Review” last month, and was asked “where do we go from here?” Reid, for once, was crystal clear:

What we’ve done with Obamacare is [take] a step in the right direction, but we’re far from having something that’s going to work forever.

When pressed by one of the panelists about whether that meant that Obamacare was just one more step towards a single-payer, insurance- and exchange-free health care system run entirely by the government, Reid said: “Yes, yes. Absolutely, yes.”

For totalitarians like Reid, Obama, Sebelius, and others, those glitches truly signify success after all.

California insurance broker Jason Andrew planned to help a couple of his clients sign up for Obamacare on Tuesday, the first day of the federal health care roll out, but couldn’t, for two reasons: first, he hadn’t yet been certified by the state to do so, and secondly, he couldn’t get accurate quotes from the state exchange’s computer. Andrew just laughed it off:

In District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin’s ruling in Floyd v. The City of New York on Monday, there was both good news and bad news. The good news is that Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s policy, with the enthusiastic cooperation of his police commissioner Ray Kelly, violates both the Fourth and the Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. The bad news is that,

When Michele Catalano blogged yesterday using the title “Pressure Cookers, backpacks and quinoa, oh my!” it didn’t gain purchase until it was picked up by the Guardian. From there the story jumped to The Atlantic which, 24 hours later, had more than a third of a million views.

The Mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland, Cheye Calvo, was taking a shower in his home late Tuesday afternoon, July 29th, 2008 in preparation for a meeting he had that night. He heard a loud explosion at the front door of his home followed by the screaming of his mother-in-law who

This article first appeared at McAlvany Intelligence Advisor on Friday, July 19th, 2013:

After months of stalling and threats of a filibuster against Obama’s radical nominees to various agency posts, Senate Republicans have given up and are letting President Obama nominate the devil himself, if he chooses.

In a surprisingly underreported event, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid won a major victory in the Senate by threatening to

Although President Obama says he has many strong candidates to replace Janet Napolitano as secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, it’s clear that NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly has the inside track. If Obama is determined to complete building the surveillance state nationally, Kelly is just the man

Many were surprised at Janet Napolitano’s announcement that she was leaving her position as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at the end of August to become President of the University of California. Chosen from more than 300 candidates vying for the position, Napolitano managed to keep her interest in, and her successful bid for, that position from the public until Friday.

When Bernie Zalaznik, the Resident Vice President of the Wichita Branch Office of EMC Insurance Companies sent a letter to Kansas school districts on May 15th, just two weeks before Kansas Law 2052 takes effect, alarm bells went off. The letter said:

At a hearing at the House of Representatives on Thursday a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did his best to defuse growing concerns about excessive purchases of ammunition for its 72,000 agents. These purchases were needed, said Nick Nayak, because of

Ron Trowbridge is the Undersheriff of Prowers County, Colorado, located at the extreme southeast corner of Colorado, with a population of fewer than 20,000 souls. He decided to attend a training session in La Junta on April 1st, along with about 2o others, to learn about Sovereign Citizens and

I’m intrigued by the people put into places of influence, wondering who they are and how they got there. More importantly, what their background might portend for the program they’re heading up. Hutchinson, the man Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, tapped to lead its National School Shield Program, has an interesting background.